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Un-real
Best of TV 2004
BY JOYCE MILLMAN

It was an unexpectedly rich year for un-reality television. That’s un-reality as in scripted entertainment, not un-reality as in that Bad Thing that happened on November 2. Here is my Ten Best of TV 2004. Warning: this is a Desperate Housewives–free zone.

1) The Sopranos (HBO)

Season five played like the grimmest fairy tale ever told. It opened with Carmela, defiantly in possession of the Soprano home after her separation from Tony, being menaced by a stray bear nosing around the back door. It ended with Tony — ursa major — crashing out of the woods after fleeing the feds through snow and stream, to be welcomed at that same back door by his wife. He had reclaimed his queen and his castle by agreeing to an equitable division of spoils. In between all of that, the Prince (Christopher) and the Pauper (Tony’s cousin, Tony B.) battled it out for the King’s affections while Red Riding Hood (Adrianna) discovered that there really is a Big Bad Wolf. A stunning, harrowing return to form, deserving of its overdue Emmy for Best Drama Series.

2) The year of J.J. Abrams (ABC)

Alias continued to weave a surprising web of intrigue. This season, J.J. Abrams’s spy drama was restyled as a psycho-sexual homage to Alfred Hitchcock, with heroine Sydney and her former lover Vaughn as two points of a triangle completed by frosty blonde double agent Lauren Reed. Abrams added to his reputation as TV’s most gifted storyteller with his desert-island fantasy series Lost, the best new drama of the year. (Alias returns in a new time slot following Lost on Wednesday January 5.) Lost is addictive, provocative, and layered with the kind of mythology from which cults are born. Join us! Then you too can spend hours in chat rooms debating questions like, "Are the plane crash survivors actually in some kind of afterlife?", "Is Mr. Locke really God?", and "Jack or Sawyer?" (By the way, the correct answer to the last question is, "Sayid.")

3) Nip/Tuck (FX)

Serial slashers! Three-ways! Transsexuals! Joan Rivers! The second season of TV’s most intensely pleasurable nighttime soap was even sexier, funnier, smarter, and weirder than the first, with Miami plastic surgeons and best buddies Sean McMahon and Christian Troy falling apart and coming together in all imaginable permutations of male bonding. But Nip/Tuck is not skin deep. It cuts to the heart of relationships — men and women, parents and children — with a hand steady enough to reveal the messy knot of tenderness and selfishness that makes people tick. And did I mention the three-ways?

4) The Office Special (BBC America)

The tragicomic BBC mockumentary series wrapped up with a two-hour coda revisiting the (fictional) Wernham Hogg paper company to see how inept middle manager David Brent and his co-workers were coping with reality-TV fame. Co-creator and star Ricky Gervais’s portrayal of the delusional Brent’s slow unraveling was as moving as it was funny; after being laid off, he was humiliated to find that his "celebrity" was not all it was cracked up to be. For all his blindered view of his (non-existent) motivational skills and musical talent, surely Brent didn’t deserve this. The Office Special is destined to be a Yuletide classic for its sweet, tangy office Christmas-party dénouement, in which Brent and indecisive would-be lovers Tim and Dawn were saved by the unexpected grace of second chances.

5) Rescue Me (FX)

This gritty, morbidly funny and weirdly beautiful dramedy about New York City firefighters from Denis Leary and Peter Tolan was haunted by personal demons and the ghosts of fallen brethren. As the alcoholic, frayed anti-hero, Leary’s cathartic performance should not be overlooked come awards time.

6) Veronica Mars (UPN)

This sparkling mystery drama about a sleuthing teenage outcast nicely fills the Buffy the Vampire Slayer void. Kristen Bell plays an admirably sarcastic heroine, and there have been some gutsy surprises in the twisty tale of Veronica’s best friend’s murder and her own family’s implosion at the hands of the wealthy, powerful elite of their affluent suburb. A very cool show.

7) Something the Lord Made (HBO)

A dignified but far from passionless docudrama about the white surgeon and the black lab technician who discovered heart bypass surgery. This Emmy winner for best TV movie proved that "message movies" (here, racism in the Jim Crow South) need not be bombastic or maudlin. Alan Rickman and Mos Def performed an acting duet of warmth and understatement.

8) Masterpiece Theatre (PBS)

PBS can’t seem to get contemporary American drama right (the pallid PBS Hollywood Presents offering Cop Shop), but who cares as long as there’s still an England and Masterpiece Theatre? Helen Mirren returned as obstinate detective Jane Tennison in one of her best series, Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness. The gorgeously filmed mini-series The Lost Prince chronicled the end of the Victorian dream through the story of a Windsor family secret. And Ray Winstone made an unlikely but commanding Henry VIII in an amphetamine-paced filming of one of history’s juiciest soaps.

9) Saturday Night Live (NBC)

Tina Fey’s classy, smart-girl news anchoring, Amy Poehler’s radiant emergence as the most versatile funnywoman on television, the endearing, deeply eccentric characters of Will Forte and Fred Armisen, Darrell Hammond’s bone-chilling Donald Rumsfeld — I could go on and on. Instead, I’ll sum it up in four words: the best cast ever.

10) Regency House Party (PBS)

Another British import, this reality series gathered a group of single men and women to pass a summer of chaperoned flirtation in Jane Austen–era style. The clumsy, old-fashioned mating attempts of these would-be Elizabeth Bennets and Mr. Darcys suggested — sometimes hilariously, sometimes wistfully — that courtship and marriage can never be in our modern time what they were in Austen’s. For better and worse.


Issue Date: December 24 - 30, 2004
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